Double Feature of 80s Nostalgia Comes to Town

Many a horror fan has a soft spot for those campy VHS-bound classics of the 80s. Mike McGraner—Emmy award winning director of Fritz the Nite Owl—certainly does. He’s indulging this interest with the monthly double feature series, Terror from the Eighties.

“When I was a kid I used to cut newspaper advertisement movie posters. It was so cool to see pictures of these movies that I would never be allowed to see as a kid,” he says. “So many of these movies get lost. This is the way to celebrate that, to remember when you would walk through a video store and see that awesome cover art for some of these movies. You may not have even seen the movie but you remember the video art or you remember the poster.”

Each episode of Terror from the Eighties connects two undisclosed but thematically linked horror films, presented like aged prints — “kind of like Grindhouse,” he says.

“I originally set out to make it feel like an 80s drive-in. I just liked the whole Grindhouse idea: An A picture followed by a B picture. There are so many titles in 80s horror, if we did just one film a month, I felt like we would never even scrape the surface.”

McGraner developed a methodical process for culling the candidates for his series.

“I actually picked from a list of about 4,000 films,” he says of his first exploration of the decade’s worth of horror output. “I narrowed it down to 400. From those 400 I narrowed it down to 80.”

“Going from 4000 – 400, that was the tedious part,” he says. “Then I started whittling that down.”

Then McGraner paired the films to create workable themes.

“I looked up the box office for each to determine which would be the A film and which B,” he says. “I’ll see which one did better financially. That picture plays first, the other plays second.”

What McGraner came up with was a set of mystery double features.

“You won’t know the titles of the movies but you’ll know the theme of the month,” he says.

The theme for September: Sneak Preview.

“Those films deal with cinema or cinema obsession,” he says.

The fun of the surprise is part of the draw, but for McGraner, the real pull is the opportunity to share this common fondness.

“It’s a chance to gather with other horror fans and – good or bad movies – see them on the big screen,” he says. “If you think something’s cheesy, feel free to laugh. It’s a big party.”